Poetry review by Steve Bennett

Henry Normal has been partly responsible for some of the biggest TV hits of the last two decades. After founding the Baby Cow production house with Steve Coogan, his name’s been at the end of the credits for hits such as Gavin and Stacey, The Mighty Boosh, Moone Boy, The Trip, Mid Morning Matters, Nighty Night and Uncle.

But three months ago he quit as chief executive 'to pursue creative endeavours in other fields’ – including a return to the poetry he performed on the comedy circuit in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Though with new material, naturally.

In one of his new poems he likens himself to the frame of the Mona Lisa, with all the attention focussed on the famous people around him, and none on himself. And the limited market for performance poetry means he’ll likely remain out of that spotlight.

As a  modest figure, he’ll probably be happy with that. He sits on the edge of the Latitude poetry stage, as much one of us than a performer relishing an elevated status. Tom Jones gets knickers thrown at him, while Normal is offered a biscuit, following a poem on the topic. And that’s not the only verse built on his humble, nay normal, background, even if his TV work means he can now live in a house with an impressive four bathrooms.

One poem’s called Tinned Fruit And Evaporated Milk, evoking the dessert the Normal family – not their real names, of course – would have every Saturday in their Nottingham home. Many Englishmen and women of a certain generation will identify with the 59-year-old’s observations, as well as with the emotional distance between Henry and his father, struggling to say ‘I love you’ or embrace each other.

His family feature in several poems, and in the affable chat between them. He writes love poems that are unsentimental, but still touching because of their authenticity, while others are inspired by seeking help for his son’s ‘mildly severe ‘ autism – the subject of a forthcoming Radio 4 programme, too. Normal also reveals both he and his father are somewhere on the spectrum.

Such topics are tackled with a light, skilful touch – although not all Normal’s work is comic, which may be a surprise given his background. There’s a plea to consider compassion more heroic than machismo; and a couple of warm and righteous poems about accepting all humanity as one. One of these has an awkward preamble about immigrants, but you can’t fault its sentiment. The comedy circuit was more politicised when Normal was working it, and that socially conscience ethos is still strong in his work.

His forte,of course, are the ditties – short, delightful jokes and aphorisms in rhyming form that still pack a twist in their tail. And speaking of rhymes, he has a decent showing of comically tortured ones that he can mock-boast about. He’s a clever wit who wears that intelligence lightly.

A couple of times that seemed to slip, with poems boasting more obvious loftier ambitions, which didn’t chime with today’s audience.  There are probably not enough people with Adrian Mitchell’s Ten Ways to Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow To Anybody to appreciate Normal’s rewriting it as break-up advice; while a longer poem about the fictional diary of a dinosaur fell awkwardly between comedy, education and making a point.

But when he’s writing with a comic voice, he’s as assured as you would expect… In the near 20 years he’s been off the circuit he’s been script-doctoring so many of those TV hits that there’s no danger of him having rusty. A languid audience on a hot afternoon didn’t always give these gags the recognition they deserved, but there’s nothing Normal about his writing.

Review date: 16 Jul 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett